Yesterday, the Senate voted 96-2 to confirm Bernice Bouie Donald to be a U.S. Circuit Judge for the 6th Circuit. The Senate also invoked cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 1249 by a vote of 93-5. Also, GOP Leader McConnell introduced S. J. Res 25, a joint resolution disapproving of the president’s exercise of authority to increase the debt limit. If the resolution is passed and signed, it would deny the president’s request to increase the debt limit an additional $500 billion.
Today the Senate resumed post-cloture consideration of the motion to proceed to H.R. 1249, the patent reform bill. Later today, the Senate is likely to agree to the motion to proceed to the patent reform bill, and amendments may be offered.
Last night, Leader McConnell introduced S. J. Res 25, a joint resolution disapproving of the president’s exercise of authority to increase the debt limit. If the resolution is passed and signed, it would deny the president’s request to increase the debt limit an additional $500 billion.
Tomorrow night, at 7 PM, President Obama will address a Joint Session of Congress and supposedly lay out his proposals for creating jobs, but press reports suggest that his plans are likely to consist mostly of much of the same federal spending and stimulus ideas that his administration already tried. The results of those, unfortunately, are plain to see: stagnant job growth, millions of Americans out of work, and a staggering national debt. Another option expressed by Bill Smith, Editor, ARRA News Service: "I do not wish to be frustrated with another Teleprompter Performance. If I learn that the President admitted that he has been wrong in his policies and is sorry for his failures, I will watch his comments on the Fox News' replays or on YouTube. Instead, I will join millions of "red blooded" Americans in preparing food and snacks for Thursday night's 8:30 PM (ET) NFL season kickoff: the Green Bay Packers verse the New Orleans Saints."
Today, ALG President Bill Wilson blasted Barack Obama's picking Alan Krueger as head of the Council of Economic Advisors: "In light of his refusal to condemn the extremist remarks of Teamsters' boss Jimmy Hoffa, promising to 'take out' the tea party, it is deeply disturbing that Barack Obama would nominate someone who has taken the radical position of advocating for the unionization of prisoners. Alan Krueger has even supported paying the minimum wage and overtime to prisoners. This is the man that is supposed to turn our broken economy around?"
Discussing the reports of Obama’s speech on the Senate floor yesterday, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said, “[W]hile I have no doubt the President will propose many things on Thursday that, when looked at individually, sound pretty good, or that he’ll call them all bipartisan, I’m equally certain that, taken as whole, they’ll represent more of the same failed approach that’s only made things worse over the past few years, and resulted in even fewer jobs than when he started. Over the weekend, the President tested a few of the lines I expect we’ll hear on Thursday. His central message, evidently, is that anyone who doesn’t rubber stamp his economic agenda is putting politics above country. With all due respect, Mr. President, there’s a much simpler reason for opposing your economic proposals that has nothing to do with politics: they don’t work.”
The New York Times notes, “The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, warned against any initiatives that resembled the economic stimulus legislation passed soon after Mr. Obama took office in 2009. He and other Republicans said an overactive federal government was stifling economic growth. ‘The problem with our economy is not that Washington is doing too little, but that Washington is doing too much already,’ Mr. McConnell said on the Senate floor. The stimulus package, he said, has been an ‘epic failure.’ ‘As government continued to grow, the economy sputtered,’” Mr. McConnell said. ‘And it’s still sputtering. That’s the reason so many people are skeptical of this president’s economic proposals. They don’t work as advertised.’ ‘In the two and half years since President Obama signed his signature jobs bill, the so-called stimulus,’ Mr. McConnell said, ‘there are 1.7 million fewer jobs in this country.’ The Labor Department says that nonfarm payroll employment totaled 131.1 million in August, compared with 132.8 million in February 2009.”
And yet Democrats are still calling for more of the same Washington-centric ideas involving ever more government spending. According to the NYT, “House and Senate Democrats are urging President Obama to propose spending on a host of new public works and job programs in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Thursday. But Republicans vowed to resist such initiatives, saying they had been a spectacular failure in the last two and a half years.”
As Leader McConnell said, “By any measure, including [the president’s] own, the Stimulus, and the economic principles it was built on, have been a failure. . . . Businesses don’t want shots in the arm or quick-fixes. They want to know what the landscape will look like a few years down the road. And until now, that’s not something the President has been willing to do. He just hasn’t been able to bring himself to let go of government’s grip. . . . We need to shift the center of gravity away from Washington and back to the innovators and entrepreneurs, the engineers and the shop-floor managers who will be at the heart of our recovery. And we need to be serious about it.
“The President is forever eager to embrace big proposals whenever government’s at the helm, but when it comes to doing the kinds of things job creators really want, he’s suddenly timid. He’ll agree to a tax cut as long as it’s temporary. He’ll agree to reverse a job-killing regulation, but only if he knows he’s gotten dozens of other doozies in the pipeline behind it.
“We need to do better than that,” Leader McConnell said. “We need the President to be as bold about liberating job creators as he’s been about shackling them. I mean, you don’t lift a single regulation and suddenly claim to be Margaret Thatcher.”
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